Dr. Nyla Ali Khan to be honored with President’s Volunteer Service Award
Monday, September 24, 2018, Oklahoma City: Dr. Nyla Ali Khan, professor at Rose State College, and former professor at the University of Nebraska-Kearney will receive the President’s Volunteer Service Award & Silver Medal next month in OKC for her public speaking (nation wide)/ bridge building work at the community and grassroots level in the State of Oklahoma. Dr. Khan’s unflinching commitment to pedagogy, scholarship, and her unrelenting faith in the critical focus that education can provide motivate her to build bridges across racial, political, and ideological divides.
She is the author of four books, including The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism and Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir: Between Indian and Pakistan, and several articles that focus heavily on the political issues and strife of her homeland, Jammu and Kashmir, India. She did her Masters in Postcolonial Literature and Theory at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and obtained her Ph.D. at the same institution. She visits Kashmir frequently and have recently been active in giving lectures on the subject on Kashmir at universities in Oregon, Maryland, California, Washington DC, and New York. Nyla’s goal is to engage in reflective action as an educator working with diverse cultural and social groups questioning the exclusivity of cultural nationalism, the erosion of cultural syncretism, the ever-increasing dominance of religious fundamentalism, and the irrational resistance to cultural and linguistic differences. Nyla was made a member of the Advisory Council of the Oklahoma Commission on the Status of Women, a member of the Oklahoma Academy, a state-wide public policy group, and was on the board of Generation Citizen, which seeks to empower the younger generation through civics education.
For more information about the PVSA program at HWF, please contact the coordinator Hilda Xavier at info@happyworldfoundation.us or 405-474-3310
